From the vantage point of 1995, it would be hard to convey to an outsider just how much the study of social movements has changed in the last ten years. Although the field grew apace with the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, European and especially American scholars continued to work in relative ignorance of each other until well into the 1980s. Among the earliest vehicles facilitating contact between movement scholars from different countries were two conferences organized by Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow and held at Cornell University and the Free University in Amsterdam in the summers of 1985 and 1986, respectively. Stimulated by the contacts established at these two meetings, the cross-national discourse between movement scholars accelerated markedly over the next few years. Between 1986 and 1992 at least five other international gatherings of movement scholars took place. One of the most fruitful of these was held in Berlin in July 1990 under the sponsorship of the research unit on “social movements and the public” of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Under the direction of Friedhelm Neidhardt, this unit has functioned more generally as one of the central nodes in the rapidly expanding international network of movement scholars.

It was in the spirit of these international gatherings that we decided to organize the conference at which most of the essays included in this volume were first presented as papers. Under the title “Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes,” the conference took place at the Life Cycle Research Institute at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in August 1992. Moreover, since that gathering, at least four other international conferences of social movement scholars have taken place, including meetings in Amsterdam and Geneva in the summer of 1995.